Exposure by Helen Dunmore

Sexual blackmail mixes with marital mistrust in a complex Cold War thriller

Few modern novelists can rival Helen Dunmore for showing how the horrors of
history smash into individual lives. Her fiction is impressively
wide-ranging, but the theme she constantly returns to is the impact of
public catastrophe on personal intimacy.

Her first novel, Zennor in Darkness (1993), explored how the tensions of the
First World War affected DH Lawrence and his German wife, Frieda. Her most
recent, The Lie (2014), focused on a former soldier dealing with traumas
thrown up by that war. Her masterpieces, The Siege (2001) and The Betrayal
(2010), followed a couple through the siege of Leningrad, then through
postwar Stalinist purges. Repeatedly, she homes in on personal pain — and
small-scale, heroic resistance.

Exposure, her 14th novel, also deals with war but here it is the Cold War and
the duplicities it spawned. In 1960, Simon Callington, a middling civil
servant working for